Windows Threshold shots show Start menu, windowed Modern UI

Judging by the latest rumors, the Start menu won't make its comeback until the release of Windows Threshold—which means we may not get it until next year. Some people are already running pre-release builds of Threshold, though, and the guys at Myce have posted a couple of alleged screenshots of the pre-release operating system.

The shots show the Start menu, which has the same blend of old-school design and shrunken Modern UI tiles as the prototype Microsoft showed at Build earlier this year. Here, the menu's right pane includes both live tiles and File Explorer shortcuts to This PC, Documents, and Pictures.

More notably, Myce's screenshots show a Modern UI app, the Windows Store, running in windowed mode inside the desktop interface. This is another one of the rumored Threshold features: apparently, Modern UI apps will only work inside windows on desktop PCs. No more full-screen nonsense.

While the screenshot shows a plain title bar for the Windows Store app, Myce says the final build of Threshold will have a special title bar design for Modern UI windows. That design is simply "quite jerky in some of the current builds." Myce seems to be alluding to a recent Neowin story, which says Modern UI apps in desktop mode will be "flat with no titlebar but minimizing and easy close access is still present." That design will apparently mirror the current Windows 8.1 look, where full-screen Modern UI apps have black title bars that auto-hide.